


A (French) Pressing Matter

by luckybarton



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Coffee Shops, Deaf Clint Barton, Drama, Gen, Humor, Hydra (Marvel), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Undercover Missions, barista clint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-15 06:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9223625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/pseuds/luckybarton
Summary: Clint likes coffee more than Tony Stark does, which is saying something-- but that's because Tony drinks instant andoh god no.Coffee should be dark. Pure.Unadulterated. And you should have seen the bean at some point in the process.And then some unfortunate soul at SHIELD (who's going to get what's coming to them, mark his words) puts him on an assignment where he's an undercover barista, of all things. Nobody orders proper coffee, or, well, theydo, and then it's Clint's job to disfigure it until it's to their liking. To say the least, it's painful.But there's more to be concerned about than the way his clientele likes their coffee, and uncovering what's going on is going to take his all... and a lot of caffeine.





	1. Cappuchi-NO!

"Would you like space for milk?" Clint growled. 

The teenage girl glared back at him. "No".

"Good," he said, filling her cup and then going off to work on the next customer's Chocolate Vanilla Peppermint Frankencchino or whatever it was. Sure, Fury could have a sick sense of humour at times, but this was pushing the limit. Assigned to a coffee shop, of all places. It was the assignment so of course he’d do it, but damn if it didn't make him want to punch someone—specifically, Fury. If not physically, verbally. Deep cover was usually somewhat exciting. This was slow death, ruining coffees with milk and cream and sugar for customers who overpaid by ridiculous amounts.

"Smile more." his boss had told him after pulling him aside the other day. "People don't want to walk into a coffee shop and be greeted with a thousand-mile-glare."

"Is this a warning?" he'd asked glibly.

"You should consider it one."

So when Clint purposefully misspelled the name of the customer who'd just purchased a grande-venti-diabetes-in-a-cup and plunked it unceremoniously down on the counter, he did it with a smile. The next customer to come up handed him a slip of paper along with the cash. He discreetly pocketed it, vowing to read it later. Most likely, it was part of his real job. This guy was probably an agent of SHIELD, but Clint hoped it was his number.

The SHIELD agent and/or potential date had ordered something that involved blending a brownie into the coffee. It hurt to make it. Poor coffee. One day he'd avenge it.

\---

The briefing at the end of the day was a welcome respite from the horrors of his cover-day-job but quickly devolved into something just as bad. "Did you see anything suspicious?" Hill asked him.

"I was passed a note," he said, "haven't read it yet, though." He tossed it over to his superior, who read it, then folded into four and pocketed it. Perfect aim. "Uh, what was it?"

"A number," she said, "which you're not going to call." Oh. Hill crossed her arms. "While our techies track down who gave you this... you need to get back to your job, and focus more," she said. "Our targets frequent this shop. We need to know who they're meeting with and when."

"I haven't seen them yet." Clint said. "For real." _Great, now I’m on the shit list_. An hour passed where much was said but nothing was done before Hill adjourned the meeting. Fortunately for Clint, the ‘shit list’ had expanded to contain everyone but Natasha, who was deeply disapproving of the whole situation. Clint was the first to leave, hoping to get home before her.

\---

Nat was back at the flat SHIELD had rented for them before Clint was anyway, somehow. "How's the job?"

"Shit." Clint said. "Same as yesterday, and the day before it."

"You like coffee." Natasha said. "I'd have thought it would be nice for you."

"I like coffee, not ruining coffee," Clint replied, "if coffee is art, this is art in a blender with milk and syrup and a fucking brownie."

"Modern art." 

Clint laughed. "Same deal." he said. "My boss is one wrong drink away from firing me." 

Natasha narrowed her eyes. "It's been three days."

"Three days of hell, Nat. You know, they expect me to smile. All the damn time. And the targets are never there, but Hill expects new intel at each meeting."

"Use your training, Clint." Natasha said with venom. "You've done much harder missions than this. Don't get fired." Despite Natasha's irritation, though, the rest of the night was spent watching Kingsman and laughing at everything that they got wrong.

"I want those glasses so bad," Clint said, slurring over— _how many? he hadn't counted_ —shots of vodka, "and the pen. I need Stark to make me the pen." He pulled out his phone and started typing, sending off five separate, equally unintelligible texts before being distracted by the onscreen action.

"It's so bad." Natasha said, less affected by the alcohol than Clint. "But hilarious, at the same time." It was a strange sight—two infamous SHIELD spies getting drunk and laughing at a Hollywood rendition of their jobs—but for Clint and Nat it was just another Wednesday.

Clint woke up with a pounding headache and Netflix asking him if he was still watching the screen. Apparently drunk-him (or asleep-him?) had gone on to watch two more movies before falling asleep on the couch. After prying himself off the cushions that were now sticky with sweat, he downed a glass of water as quickly as possible and skipped breakfast. Natasha, it seemed, had already left—not that he ever knew if she was in the same building as him if she wasn’t within line of sight. Nat was sneakier than him somehow, and his hearing aids didn’t pick up her footsteps.

“Going somewhere?” she asked from behind as he reached for his shoes that had been haphazardly kicked into a corner by the door. Clint jumped up and pivoted to face his enemy— _no, it was Nat, silly_ —who laughed.

“Get changed first,” she said. “You stink. And I don’t mean _mmm, you must have been working in the heat all day, how sexy,_ I mean you smell like ass. You won’t get any more numbers like that,” she teased.

“Uh, thanks for letting me know you’re still pissed at me,” Clint replied.

“Look, if your boss is like you say he is, showing up like that will get you fired, not sent home.” Natasha said. “I’m not ‘pissed’, I just don’t want to get back and find out you’ve blown the operation. I’m looking out for you,” she hissed, “because I know you’ll subconsciously find a way out of your job. Like what you were about to do.”

“Mmhmm,” Clint grunted, and headed towards the bedroom where his clothes were.

“Shower, too,” she yelled after him.

\---

Clint’s head started pounding as soon as he started taking orders. It was too bright and noisy and smelly in here. Even the soft indie music that played over the speakers was somehow doing his head in. So he took his aids out and focused on the lips of his coworkers and customers. The near-silence was relieving, but it was definitely the last time he’d ever come here hungover. Maybe even the last time full stop, if he could make the case to Hill or Fury that he’d be better off somewhere else. They could have sent anyone, for crying out loud. There were dozens of newbie agents dying to get some ‘real field work’. He handed over another mocha monstrosity to a customer with a smile— _the fifth one today, damnit_ —but almost dropped it upon recognition of who it was: their primary target.

 

Of _course_ she had to show up right now. Of _course_ she’d have a shitty taste in coffee. _It makes it a little easier to hate her,_ Clint thought as he watched the unsuspecting suspect take a seat near the window with one eye and the coffee with the other. Just a little.


	2. Don't Be Latte

The target sat down at a chair near the main window of the coffee shop. Clint thought it was a strange choice: he would have gone for something further back, maybe. He was fortunate that the shop didn't have a seating area on another floor, or that's where they surely would have disappeared to. The file he'd been made to read gave few details on who they were or why SHIELD was after them, only that they had Hydra ties and could potentially lead them back to the main group operating in the area.

"Clint," one of his coworkers elbowed him, "stop spacing out, man. The orders are getting backed up."

"Right." Clint said, snapped out of his focus. He checked to see if she'd noticed him—which thankfully was not the case. She was similarly enthralled with her coffee—if you could call it coffee—and seemed oblivious to the world around her. He went to put together the orders he'd been neglecting. All three had a different list of ingredients to create some drink that was definitely not on the menu. "Is this allowed?" he hissed at the girl at the till.

"Sadly, yes." she whispered back. "Just make them." Whatever tortures he'd inflicted on the coffee in the last few days, this was worse. "If there's a coffee Geneva Convention, this violates it," he muttered under his breath as he struggled to locate all of the syrups required to create the three drinks. Someone else had already handled the names, unfortunately. He had the perfect permutations to punish this trio.

"The heck was that?" he asked once the morning crowd had cleared. "There was practically a grocery list of ingredients."

"Secret menu." Till Girl shrugged. It had been a few days working with her and he still didn't know her name. "It's, uh, a website people go on. They order crazy things, and the ones they like, they share the recipes."

Clint shook his head. "Weird."

What was weirder, though, was the behaviour of his target. She'd come up twice to order drinks since she’d arrived, but hadn't glanced at a phone or used a laptop-- or any piece of technology, really. Clint looked away. _Maybe she’s not a real target: just a weirdo who’s managed to make herself look suspicious._

When he looked back, there was a man sitting next to her. Clint cursed under his breath for not paying more attention to what was going on, then cursed again when he realised who the man was, so he headed to the washroom and called Hill.

"What do you want?" she said disgruntledly over the phone.

"Suspects are meeting and I'm stuck behind the counter." he whispered back.

"Why don't you turn up your hearing aid?"

He had them back in at that point, his hangover having dissipated. “You know that's not how it works."

"I'm busy," she said, "and it's important, so I'm sending a junior agent over to sit in the adjacent table, which they'll bug. You copy?"

“Copy.” Hearing a click at the other end of the line, Clint stuffed the phone into his back pocket and scowled. He reached into a different one and felt for the wires he was carrying. One, two, three- all there. Whoever Hill sent would come too late to catch anything useful from the suspects’ conversation. On his way back to the counter, he scanned the room. _The fake plant is a good target,_ he pondered, _but how do I get there in the least suspicious way possible?_ He grabbed a small paper cup from behind the counter, filled it with water, then walked over to the plant and began to pour.

“Clint!” Till Girl crowed, having just returned from her break. “You know that tree’s not real, yeah?”

“Uh.” Clint said, surreptitiously attaching the wire to a branch before stopping. “I do now.” The co-worker he’d yet to nickname or learn the name of snickered behind her. Clint did his best to look sheepish while throwing away the cup in a nearby trash can, bugging it as well. Before anyone could say much more on the topic or investigate any potential damage to the plant pot, however, a drove of people stampeded through the doorway.

The lunchtime period was more akin to a videogame than Clint had expected, but not in any way that was entertaining. Waves of customers came in at predictable times, generally ordering predictable items. It was almost a sport, guessing who would order which drinks. He’d managed to learn the names of the people he worked with by doing this- they kept a tally of how many correct guesses they had made on a notepad behind the counter during the lulls between each successive onslaught. Till Girl was Lucy and the one who stayed quiet except when he felt the need to be rude was Joel.

Clint was surprisingly good at the game for someone who’d only played it once, but then again, spotting patterns was part of his job. The generalizations he made were less about demographic and more about the way someone carried themselves and the expressions they made before ordering. Treating it like spy work made the amochalypse slightly more bearable- until he looked up and realized that the target and her buddy had found a third friend.

Clint's phone buzzed in his pocket; he'd been sent a message by Hill stating that an agent would be there shortly. Too goddamn late- the trio had exited the building by the time they had arrived. Hopefully the plant’s wire had picked up something useful in the time it had been there. His radio receiver and recording device was stuffed into his backpack in the staff room, so he supposed he could check it later.

 

\------

 

As it turned out, "later" never came. While he'd had a chance to listen to the key parts of the tapes, he wasn't able to pick up any information he could use for himself. Instead, when it was his time to speak at the daily meeting, he simply slid over the tape containing the recordings.

"I don't need a blank tape." Hill said. "The agent I sent arrived just as the target and their collaborators left the scene." The agent, who was sitting on the opposite side of the table as Clint, nodded.

His superior shoved the tape back to him. "Clint, this is less than useless. Did you at least make some observations?" Clint relayed what he had seen, which wasn't much.

"The tape wasn't useless, though." he said. "I planted the bugs just after our phone call ended. It wasn't the beginning of their meeting, but, er, it's something."

"I appreciate your initiative," Hill replied, "but you should have waited for the agent I sent to arrive. The last thing we want is for them to get suspicious."

"You didn't order me not to." 

"It was implied. You’re a grown man and an elite sniper. Do I really need to make you a list of what I don't want you to do every mission?"

“Well, baristas don’t do much sniping, do they? You could have assigned _her_ to my position,” he said, gesturing to the least experienced member of his team, “and she’d have done the same job, if not better. You’re wasting my time.”

Before Hill could properly react, however, Natasha interjected in a tone that neither of them dared to question. "This conversation has dragging on far too long, and from what I know from observing you and Barton, it will also get nowhere. I’d let it keep going so I could watch, but several of us here still have something to present.”

"Speak to me later." Hill spat, for the moment seeming more like an angry teacher than an agent of SHIELD. “I’ll give the recording to the data processing department. We’ll have a report and a transcription by tomorrow. Agent Romanoff, what did you have to say?”

“I have a similar objection as Barton, but I think I can articulate it better than him.” she said, then hastily tacked on an apology to Clint when he gave her a dirty look. “You’ve placed us all in positions in which we have no ability to interact with any suspects outside of highly scripted conversations from which we may glean nothing. And I do have to agree with his last statement. You are wasting all of our time.” She paused, waiting for someone to start talking. Nobody did. “Whoever designed this sorry excuse for a mission is incompetent and I’m shocked that Fury approved any part of it.” A murmur of approval.

“I will investigate it.” Hill said. “Meeting adjourned. Barton, Romanoff, I want you to stay behind.”


	3. Amochalypse Now

“I understand your concerns about this mission.” Hill began. Clint looked about ready to shoot his mouth off again, but kept quiet as she continued to talk. “You need to understand that I was assigned to this mission on short notice. I was told that the person who was originally to run it had fallen ill and I was the next best candidate.”

“So you had no say in the plan?” Natasha asked in measured tones.

Hill shook her head. “I read the plans on the way out, and I’m equally as confused as you are. The documents don’t continue the names of their authors, and, on closer inspection, the overall plan goes against all common sense.”

“May I see the documents?” Natasha queried. “Not the shortened version consisting of only the parts of the mission I’ll perform, the whole plan. The one that shows how it fits together.”

Hill pursed her lips. “That’s against protocol—”

“You’re kidding us.” Clint interrupted. “We’re suspicious, you’re suspicious, heck, the document is probably suspicious of itself, and you’re going by _protocol_ —”

“I was about to say I could make an exception.” Hill replied. “Of course, I can revoke yours if you like.”

Clint swallowed. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Hill acknowledged his apology with a nod. “The files are in my apartment. Do you want to go now?” The spies responded in the affirmative, and the trio left for the building soon afterwards, walking separately so as to not arouse suspicion. The meeting room was located in the ‘study room’ of a public library. Clint was sure that this wasn’t the smartest place, but, according to Hill, it was soundproofed and used regularly by so many groups that they’d blend right in. Still couldn’t go directly home, though.

Clint took the 'scenic' route back to the apartment block, which had little to no scenery besides the backsides of buildings and dumpsters but happened to be the longest path he knew that didn't involve walking in the wrong direction or walking off somewhere secluded and waiting for fifteen minutes. Once he actually reached the building, he decided to take the stairs and promptly regretted it after reaching the fourth floor are realizing Hill's room was on the eighth.

"What took you so long?" Natasha asked, having opened the door for him after almost a minute of exasperated knocking. "Did you take the stairs?"

"Uh, no." Clint lied, knowing full well Nat knew it was one. "Why would I ever do that?" he added. Sarcastic? Convincing? He wasn’t sure.

“Let’s step outside for a minute,” she responded, pushing him out the door and stopping it from closing entirely with a slipper that had been leaning against the inside wall.

"What do you think you're doing?" Natasha hissed.

"Being pissed," Clint replied, "rightfully pissed. You don't have to work in a goddamn coffee death machine."

"Clint, I was assigned to work as a cashier."

If he'd have been holding something in his mouth, Clint would have spit it out about now. "And you didn't tell me?"

"Clint, who the fuck assigns their greatest asset to be a cashier in bumfuck Canada?"

"One of their greatest _assets_."

"Fine. My point still stands," Natasha huffed, "think about it, Clint."

"Morons. Double agents. All of the above."

"Hill and I are going with the third option." Natasha replied drily. “The document is written under a pseudonym. Anyway, are you coming in or not?”

 

\------

 

Hill’s paper copy of the document detailing the mission was twenty pages long, which seemed more than adequate to Clint but according to Natasha, who for some unholy reason actually read the things in their entirety, was ridiculously short. After a few hours of discussion, however, the plan of action was even shorter. 

“Quit our jobs.” Clint deadpanned. “Hill, we already went over this. They’ll know something’s up.”

“I’ll rephrase. Get fired.” Hill replied. “We need you out of those positions as quickly as possible so you can get on with doing, you know, real spy work.”

“Says the one who’s been hounding my ass all week to shut up, smile, and pour more coffees.” Clint grumbled.

“If this wasn’t supposed to be hidden from SHIELD, I’d write you up for that.” Hill replied. “You need to realise that I didn’t, and still don’t know who was in on this. That’s why I had to do that.”

“Alright.” Clint replied, ceasing to be stubborn in what was truly a rare moment. “But that’s only an excuse for what happens before, not after. Full disclosure, right, Nat?”

“Agreed.” Natasha said, looking Clint and then Hill square in the eyes. “I’ll take that a step further. If we find out you’ve been hiding anything from us, and I mean anything, then we’ll both take the significantly-less-sneaky method of finding out who’s behind this and taking them down. And we won’t be the ones to take the blame.”

“Fine.” Hill replied. “But I expect you both free by the end of tomorrow.”


End file.
